QE4 Is Going To Be Huge – Ep. 213

  • The Trump fantasy rally continued today, of course the big irony here is that all of the stock traders who were so worried about a Donald Trump presidency
  • Now, he’s Ronald Regan re-incarnated
  • They’re partying like it’s 1983 – when Regan first stepped in the market had a very difficult couple of years
  • We went through a recession before we got that Regan Rally – we’re going to skip all that
  • It’s amazing that people believe you can have reckless monetary policy for 8 years
  • You can have zero percent interest rates, you can have all this quantitative easing
  • You can have this gigantic bubble, and we can magically go from a bubble economy to a real economy
  • Without any pain inbetween
  • If that really were the case, the Fed would have tried to raise interest rates a long time ago
  • The fact that they’ve been stuck at zero is proof that they really can’t go up
  • Now everybody seems to dismiss all these concerns simply because Donald Trump will be President
  • Even though this is the exact same guy who scared the bejesus  out of everybody right up until the moment that he was elected, and now, of course everything is going to be great
  • It’s not going to be great – this fantasy is going to come crashing into a wall of reality
  • Meanwhile, the stock market rally did fizzle out today, the market was up most of the day
  • The Dow managed to eke out about a 2 point gain
  • Although the NASDAQ was down about 50 points
  • Most of the action was in other markets
  • Oil prices up about 10% on the day
  • Crude up just under $4/barrel – just below $49/barrel at close
  • The catalyst for the surge in oil prices was an agreement by OPEC to restrict output
  • Finally OPEC getting their act together – the Saudis, the Russians working together to reduce production and increase the price of oil
  • Of course, with the dollar continuing to strengthen, that means oil prices are rising even faster for everyone outside the U.S.
  • Bond market getting clobbered again today; higher oil prices not good for the bond market
  • We also got some stronger than expected economic data out today
  • A lot of it having to do with the euphoria surrounding the Trump win
  • We did get the ADP jobs number today the precursor the official number the Labor Department puts out on Friday
  • This one was better than expected by about 50-60,000 jobs
  • They revised downward the prior month by more than was expected
  • Because of the recent change in methodology, these numbers are not too reliable